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Book Shopping

On Monday I was seized with the desire to do a spot of book
shopping. This is really very easy to do when you work in a big and beautiful
bookshop! Books were browsed and books were bought.

I was always going to buy some World Book Day Books. This
year’s are an outstandingly good selection. Goth
Girl and the Pirate Queen is crammed full of Chris Riddell’s illustrations
– my mind boggles to think all this is mine (and yours if you get yourself to a
bookshop) for £1. Also a ridiculous bargain is Geek Drama, which is set between Geek Girl 1 and 2 so there’s no
need to worry about spoilers for the new full-length story.

Talking of geeks…The
Case of the Exploding Loo is the first story by Rachel Hamilton featuring
Noelle (or Know-All) Hawkins, mystery-solving child genius. It is VERY funny
and has caused strangers to look askance at me laughing on public transport.

Faber very cunningly gave away samplers of The Girl in the Red Coat at the end of
last week. I read the one I grabbed from the hand of a woman at Euston (she was
giving them away, I didn’t randomly steal someone else’s) and haven’t stopped
thinking about it since; the half price hardback was clearly too much of a
temptation to resist. A little girl goes missing at a festival and is taken in
by a man claiming to be her grandfather...the opening chapters are so gripping
that I will read this in my next available grown-ups' fiction spot.

I am so excited that the second volume of Coffin Hill is out. I got behind with
the comics so decided to wait to read it in graphic novel form. I won’t pretend
being patient has sat easily with me, but it’s all worth it now I have this. It’s
dark and gothic and creepy and intriguing and beautiful to look at. And it has
witches.

Two more things that are beautiful to look at round off my
shopping spree. Noisy Neighbours is
full of colours and shapes that make me think of my childhood and Lemur Dreamer is just so cute. Picture
books are a joy.

I haven’t given up the idea of joining in with TBR20, but I’m
not ready just yet. And, I gave seven boxes of books to the charity shop last
week (thanks Dad for shifting them all for me) so I do have a little wiggle
room right at the moment. And buying books is one of life’s pleasures – but I
remind myself that reading them is even better.

The story of Lizzie Borden has a whiff of folklore about it, it feels hazy to me, apocryphal perhaps, something half known and uncertain like Washington and the cherry tree or the ride of Paul Revere. Shamefully, I had to Google both the latter two examples to double check they were the events I thought I was referring to. I choose them deliberately though - is it my Englishness that makes these events fuzzy to me? Do these stories live in the American psyche the way Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his six wives, and Jack the Ripper (to select three almost at random) live in mine?
I remember a book we stocked when I was a very young bookseller at Waterstones in Watford that looked at the psychology of children who murder their parents. The copy on the back of the book talked of Lizzie Borden. I remember half wondering about the case, then shelving the book away and moving onto the next armful. But it stuck in my m…

My nieces and nephews and I have a monthly book club, called Book Chase (although it sometimes gains an extra 's' to become Book Chasse). The rules are simple: we all bring something we've read during the last month, talk about it to each other, and eat snacks. We live tweet each meeting with the hashtag BookChase. Sometimes, when we remember, we Storify all the tweets too. This month, we remembered!